Marital Problems
One of the recurring themes of the collection is the difficulty of marriage. Relationships guided over the course of time are portrayed as smooth sailing only in the world of fantasy. What may be the end of a marriage arrives in the form of a spewed assault mixing the metaphorical with the literal:
“A sick man is not a devil. You, Marty, are both.”
Opening Lines
“The Gilgul of Park Avenue” commences with metaphorical imagery in which a man has a sudden epiphany which contributes to another thematic concern covered in the collection: the fragility of self-identity. The story opens with a sort of fairy tale tenor to the language, but pursue a more ambiguous narrative trajectory:
“The Jewish day begins in the calm of evening, when it won’t shock the system with its arrival. It was then, three stars visible in the Manhattan sky and a new day fallen, that Charles Morton Luger understood he was the bearer of a Jewish soul.”
Life During Wartime
“In This Way We are Wise” opens with a bombing. Three loud explosions followed by the horrible consequences. The narrator is in a café and he describes the reaction of those around him in terms both heroic and horrific, noting that those who call Jerusalem home are not prone to reacting in quite the same way as those who live in other modern metropolitan centers. Those who call the city home:
“have come to abide their climate. Terror as second winter, as part of their weather. Something that comes and then is gone.”
Waiting for Chief Santa
The story “Reb Kringle” is an ironic feast with a Jewish man hired to play a mall Santa as the main course. The dessert at the end arrives in the form of a metaphor-laden paragraph that gives the story one last comic twist:
“Chief Santa was as much of a shock to Reb Itzik as Reb Itzik was to all the children, for the wizard behind this Christmas empire was not fat or jolly or even a man, but a small thin-lipped woman, without the slightest paunch from which to laugh, whose feet had clearly never donned a curly-toed bootee.”
The Darkness
Abundant in the tome, the author makes full engagement with what is like the single most popular metaphor in 20th century fiction: darkness. Worth noting is that the aesthetic quality of the utilization of the perhaps overused metaphorical image ranks high in a couple of cases; an artistic element more assuredly applies on at least two occasions:
“The darkness had been getting closer for so long, it seemed only just that it should finally envelop them, pull them into its vacuum—the tunnel ready to swallow them up like so many coins dropped into a pocket.”
“The lightbulb hanging from a frayed wire in the ceiling went on. This was a relief; not only an end to the darkness but a separation, a seam in the seeming endlessness.”
